He starts the car. “No, just a sweet, naive, beautiful little innocent, raised in captivity by a man who loves wheatgrass.”
“So the beach doesn’t close after dark?” I say.
He backs out of the craggy parking space. “Not any of the good ones.”
9
A fudgie, apparently, is an out-of-towner. A person who cruises north in the summer to buy fudge and use subpar beaches, then flees before autumn. It seems strange that Peter never introduced me to the term, but Miles points out that the Collinses are former fudgies themselves, having moved to their favorite vacation spot when Peter was in second grade.
We drive twenty minutes through the dark before Miles pulls to the dusty shoulder of a country lane, behind two parked SUVs. There’s no sign of a lot, a sign, or a trailhead, just the cars and the woods.
“Is this private property?” I ask, hopping out to follow him into the moonlit forest, bag of fries in one hand and my milkshake in the other.
“It’s national lakeshore,” he replies. “Preserved federal land. There are better-known stretches of beach around here that get crowded, but the best spots are the ones you have to be told about to find.”
“Oh, so it’s exclusive,” I joke.
“Northern Michigan’s hottest club.” He offers me his hand as he steps over a tree that’s fallen across the makeshift path.
“Cherry Hill must be close behind it.” I release my grip on him as I hop to the far side of the log. “That place was packed.”
“We do pretty well all summer,” he says. “We’re still figuring the winters out.” He casts a meaningful sidelong look at me. “So I take a lot of side jobs in the off season.”
I feel myself blush, stop short in a puddle of moonlight.
He stills too.
“That was snobby,” I say. “The comment about the odd jobs.”
He shrugs. “You didn’t mean anything by it.”
I didn’t. But Peter, I can now admit, definitely had.
We start walking again in silence.
“You don’t need to justify what you do for work,” I clarify, after a beat. “I guess I just wanted to believe Peter had good reasons to think you weren’t good for Petra. Because if you were, like, some freeloading jerk, then Peter probably was just looking out for a friend. Instead of, you know . . .”
“In love with her?” Miles says evenly.
“Yeah.” My own voice wobbles. It’s cooler here, in the shadowed woods so close to shore. For some reason, it makes me feel all the more delicate talking about this, too exposed now that it’s just the two of us.
“Hey.” He bumps into me. “Good riddance, right?”
“I just,” I say, “feel really stupid.”
Miles stops walking. “You’re not stupid.”
I look at my feet, and his free hand closes over my elbow, sliding up and down my arm, rubbing warmth into it.
“He told you to trust him, and that’s what you did,” he insists. “That’s what you’re supposed to be able to do with people you love. They just don’t always live up to it.”
Miles ducks his head to peer into my eyes, a funny grin quirking his mouth. “Do you want to get into the car and listen to Adele?”
I laugh, wipe my damp eyes with the back of my forearm. “No, we already agreed: that won’t do any good. Might as well just see this beach. Assuming there is a beach, and you’re not just walking me off a cliff.”
“Would you want me to tell you,” he asks dryly, “or would that ruin the surprise?”
“I hate surprises.”
He cracks a smile. “There’s a beach.”
We fall back into step. The earth goes sandy as we climb. The trees thin, until suddenly we reach the crest and we’re overlooking the steep slope of a dune. At its foot, the dark lake rolls in on the sand, and across the expanse of beach, several bonfires blaze in the dark, several tents ringed around the most distant.
The whoosh and scrape of the tide against the shore dulls the voices and laughter of the other nighttime beachgoers, and it’s easy to imagine that this random group of people might be the last on earth. Station Eleven–style nomads. Or maybe that we’re on a different planet entirely, strangers in a strange land.
“Wow,” I whisper.
“Second-best beach in town,” he murmurs.
“Second best?” I turn. “You brought me to your runner-up beach?”
“No one knows about the other one,” he jokes. “I can’t just open the floodgates.”
“Who am I going to tell?” I wave my arms out to my sides. “Everyone I know is either here, my mortal enemy, or a close friend or relative of a mortal enemy.”
“Yeah, but your mortal enemy just cut you loose.” He gently pushes my shoulder. “Who’s to say I take you to Secret Beach today, and you don’t bring that wheatgrass-loving asshole there next week?”
